Michael Lithgow’s Writing Space

When I think about a writing space I think about a desire for what is absent. My writing spaces for a time have been a shifting, nomadic occupation of ‘here’ when I can get the moments to write – waiting at my daughter’s sport practices or art classes, a few free moments in the lull of an evening, on airplanes and in airports. I routinely write in cafes, using the solitude of a crowd like a studio, turning up my playlist to help withdraw from this world into the ones I am visiting in my stories. I have a home office, but I moved out of it a while ago. It’s in the basement where the cold and dark can get to you, and when we shifted some things around down there about a year ago, it became a defacto storage room. I moved upstairs to the dining room table, another kind nomadism. The light is great, but none of my talisman’s are there, just debris from my professional life and the clutter of an open space bungalow. 

But recently, I had the urge to reclaim my office in the basement. I moved the furniture and boxes to new bardo zones, and I’ve cleared away the stacks of paper and notebooks and other accumulations of neglect. It’s still cluttery, but this kind of clutter is more intentional: a small collection of sort-of-working Polaroid cameras picked up in junk stores and put to work creating image traces of the life I’m sharing; a bag of beachcombed ceramic fragments collected during a visit to Cape Breton, because that’s how they got rid of garbage back in the day, by setting it on the beach and letting the tide take it away; an enormous jar of buttons, the volume of which could only have been collected over a lifetime the way it used to be done when buttons were valuable and clothes still repaired, also a junk store find (I’ve never been sure why I keep it, a jar of possibility perhaps, and care taken for small incidental things);

 I have my grandfather’s level, a long wooden carpenter’s tool as beautiful as it is useful. My father kept it on his desk, and when my father died, I moved it to mine. There is a small shrine of old things accumulated over years –a magic lantern slide, a Victorian ink bottle, the hotel key my parents kept from their honeymoon; an old and unbelievably heavy metal tape dispenser from my wife’s grandmother’s dry goods store in Miramichi, New Brunswick; a 16th century floor tile from Valencia; a small handmade cocoon in a jar given to me by an artist in Vancouver decades ago. I also have on my desk a jar of wonderment given to me by a dear friend, things she encountered while working in the north–the jawbone of an animal, dried lichen and other weedy things, tufts of caribou fur. On top of the jar I have a 140 million year old ammonite fossil, a gift from my wife on our honeymoon. On one of the shelves is a leg bone from a moose, something I found in the mud near a cabin where I go with my writing group twice a year to share the lonely burdens of writing. And of course, there are books stuffed and crammed into shelves and stacked on the floor. One of my bookshelves I made when I lived in Chelsea, Quebec. I bought some old barnboard from a farmer and cobbled it together, the books resting on the rough circular-saw scarred surfaces of the planks.

There’s stuff on the walls, too, watercolour paintings from my dad, images of east coast fishing shacks from his days painting in Nova Scotia in the 1970s. My daughter’s artwork is on the wall. There are photographs ranging from my parent’s wedding to our cat who died recently. Also, a page cut from an old biographical encyclopedia onto which an artist printed a colourful jellyfish (I happen to love jellyfish.), tentacles draping over a partial entry for the 18th century English writer Samuel Johnson, who by his own account was born “almost dead” (due to illnesses) and who described his life lived mostly in poverty as “radically wretched”. There’s the woodblock print I picked up at a community show I chanced on in Montmartre years ago, of a bearded man at the bottom of the sea hammering out fish, turtles, seahorses and the like, on an anvil. My mother’s spinning wheel is in my office. I remember sitting at her ankles feeding raw wool onto the wooden wheel. (I don’t know where else to put it, and so it’s there.) And there’s a photograph I took from the window in an artist’s studio in east London looking over a row of estate housing towards a London skyline in the blue of dusk. It’s my window of escape from a suburban basement, a way to acknowledge my own studio practice when I’m there. 

There is a certain chaos in my writing studio, and I suppose that reflects to some extent how I write. I am a reluctant planner. For me writing is the method, the way to encounter. Eventually, structure emerges or must be imposed, just as I must rearrange the clutter of my writing space into some sort of useful scaffolding for my imagination. But only without planning can I hope to encounter the unexpected and beautiful news I am looking for. That’s why I keep things that astonish me near my desk. I also have a small, slate coaster with the word ‘hope’ chiseled into it, a gift from another writer during a dark and difficult time in my life. So there’s hope in the space, too. At least I like to think so. When I can get in there. When it doesn’t become overrun with the clutter of parenting, the clutter of what I do to pay the bills, the clutter of defeat.

Maybe my writing space is a rhythm: not just the absence of space and not just the magic of a cave, but oscillation between the nomadic and the reclusive; needing to feel like I belong in the world, that my words have place and meaning in the necessary and urgent routines of the crowd; and needing to withdraw into my private imaginarium—the collages of memory and invention from which narratives take form. A private place where risks can be taken. I need them both, I guess.

That’s where I write.